BizStory Blog

How to boost your email marketing campaign

Strengthen your online marketing strategy

The old-fashioned, ancient email system. Used since the dawn of the internet.

You’d think they’d have become dated by now – and replaced with a shiny, new internet tool, right?

Well actually, wrong.

They’ve become a powerful means for communication, and a vital tool in business’s marketing strategies.

From an e-commerce company sending out emails to engage with sales to a small business wanting to educate their leads, everyone is using an email campaign.

And it’s a huge asset to your business and general marketing strategy – sending emails is the only way you can essentially reach your customers at any time, and ask or direct them to take action.

But as any ‘strategy’ goes, there’s always going to be a way to improve it.

Learning how to take full advantage over this powerful marketing strategy will help your business achieve maximum engagement. In fact, there are many simple techniques you can use to boost your email marketing campaign.

1. Track analytics

This is the most basic power of the internet – virtually everything is trackable.

From Mailchimp to Campaign Monitor, the platform your business uses to build your email marketing strategy will have tracking options. Use this to your advantage!

Watching your email open-rates and click-throughs will help you learn:

What’s successful: You’ll be able to see trends in what your customers are most engaged with, and interested in. This will give you useful feedback on the content of your email marketing, and what it is that customers enjoy.

What doesn’t work: While knowing what works is important, having a good gage for what isn’t effective in getting your customers to take action is also beneficial. Take note of the emails that don’t get clicks, and look at the language, content, and design.

2. Create consistency

Having a consistent marketing strategy is always going to be key in engaging your customers, especially when it comes to email marketing.

Think about it this way – if your customers know what they can expect from you, they’re going to be much more confident about using your business.

This means creating a rigid timeline for your email marketing. If you already have one – review it. You’re going to need a consistent and strict plan for when you send your emails, and how frequently you do so.

Time

What time of day do you send your campaigns? You’ll need to find what time is the most effective for your email marketing campaign, and keep it the same. The best way to do this? Experiment! Invest some time in A/B testing and discover what works best for you!

Send emails at different times of the day, and discover what’s most effective. This is where your analysing will help! Finding and maintaining a send-time will help you implement a marketing strategy that will become consistent, and simultaneously give you the highest possible engagement.

Frequency

If you send a varied amount of emails each week, your customers don’t know what they’re going to get from you in the future.

Put in place or review your plan for how many emails you send out, and when. Whether it’s a few a week or a month – make sure it’s the same!

3. Use personalisation

The beauty of email marketing, is that it can be personalised. That’s the advantage we get from using the internet – there’s ample room for as much customisation as you need.

This means you can categorize your customers and use your email marketing campaign to specifically target them and their interests.

Depending on how large your business is and the range of location you work in, you can look at sending customized emails to customers in different regions. It will help increase the effectiveness of your email marketing if the purpose of your email aligns more accurately with what that customer needs.

Think about it – if you’re a clothing brand successfully selling your product all over the world, your customers in New Zealand won’t be interested in the winter catalogue that you’re selling to Americans in December.

Subscription plan

Creating an email marketing strategy that actually targets your customers interests can be aided by aligning the emails sent out, with the subscription plan they’ve opted for.

If your website or marketing strategy lets customers opt in for different forms of subscription – utilize this and tailor the quantity and content of emails sent out to each group.

Targeted groups

Not each customer is going to be interested in the same thing. Especially if your business is large, your range of services or products will be vast, and not always everyone will want everything you offer.

Send your emails to a certain type of customer – based on the service they use or the products they buy from you, or a customer that can be identified by email analytics.

4. Make sure they’re mobile-friendly

Arguably the most important factor to your email marketing strategy, is mobile compatibility. Do you open and read emails on your phone? Yup, you probably do, and so does everyone else.

It’s quite simple here: make sure your emails read well and are designed to pair well with mobile devices. Look out for:

Content

Make sure the writing isn’t too bulky and hard to digest if reading on mobile. Remember the screen is smaller, and customers almost always like to browse and skim over information.

Design

Take a look at your email design and format on a mobile device, and take note of how clear it is. If the calls to action aren’t in clear places and the formatting isn’t clear, you’ll need to change it pretty quickly!

Help make your email marketing campaign thrive

As we’ve already said – but it can’t be stressed enough – your email marketing is a valuable tool for your business! And it always will be.

No matter how old the internet ages emails will always be the ancient, yet effective, strategy to reach people.

But it’s up to you to make it as effective as possible. Review, revise, and analyse your way into a thriving marketing campaign that engages your customers and gets you the business you need.